Reunion: Chapter 1
Title: Reunion
Universe(s): Buffyverse, Dollhouse, Bones, HIMYM, Ringer, Torchwood, & more (eventually)!
Summary: Ever wonder why Buffy, Angel, Willow, Spike, Faith, Illyria, etc. split up across the country/world and seem to have taken on completely new identities? What does this mean for the fate of the world when there's a rumored apocalypse in 2012 and no one to stop it? Since Spike is the only one with any of his personality or memory left, it's up to him to track everyone down and figure out what is going on and how to stop it.
Characters: Spike (Captain John Hart), Buffy (Bridget Kelly), Faith (Echo), Angel (Seeley Booth), Willow (Lily Aldrin), Illyria (Whiskey), Dr. Temperance Brennen, Andrew Martin, Victor Machado, Henry Butler, Marshall Eriksen, Adelle DeWitt, Topher Brink, Paul Ballard, & more!
Pairing(s): This is mostly a gen!fic, but there will be some Spike/Buffy, Bridget(Buffy)/Andrew, Booth(Angel)/Brennen, and Lily(Willow)/Marshall.
Rating: PG(-13?)
Word Count: 1839
Disclaimer: All characters and universes belong to their respective creators. This is just for fun.
Spoilers: All of BtVS, Ats, and Dollhouse. Bones through season 6. HIMYM through season 6. Torchwood through season 2. Ringer through episode 2 (potentially more, but you should keep up with it so this won't spoil anything. :) ).
Author’s Note: You won't need to understand anything but BtVS/Ats to read this fic but it is a crossover. It is mostly Buffyverse/Dollhouse, but several other shows will be used. I've made some minor changes to canon for most of the universes and will make them obvious in the story. Also, in this chapter, Spike is referred to as John (as in Captain John Hart from Torchwood) for the most part, but don't worry, he'll want to be referred to as Spike soon enough. ;)
List of all chapters.
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Chapter 1
"Hurricane Irene marches north, leaving at least 8 people dead and close to 2 million without power in the states it has already hit. Tonight it bore down on millions more from the Delmarva peninsula to New Jersey and the New York metro--"
John flipped the television off as he sipped his mug of coffee.
Another natural disaster was just what America needed. Last week it was just pathetic earthquake, but it was enough to make everyone in that bloody country go crazy. Now that something was causing real damage, every single politician and public figure he knew of was making some claim that these two events are signs from God and they should be interpreted as exactly what their agenda is. It was just like them to take advantage of something as horrible as death and destruction and use it for personal gain.
Well, he didn't really have much room to talk there. Every morning he awoke with fresh memories of death and destruction caused by a look-alike named Spike and his seemingly imaginary girlfriend, Drusilla. He didn't understand any of it. While he was dreaming, he felt like he was watching new episodes of a television show where he was the star. "Spike and Dru Paint the Town Red" was what he liked to call it. Except it didn't feel like fiction at all. These dreams didn't feel like dreams. They felt like memories. They felt more real than his actual memories.
Except if he told anyone about them, they'd probably send him to a loony bin. The death and destruction in these dreams were caused by superhuman strength and razor sharp fangs. None of it made any sense. He didn't have this strength now--not even when he worked every muscle in his body daily. No matter how hard he tried to make fangs appear or his face wrinkle up, he couldn't.
Vampires were things of urban legends and pop culture. They weren't real. Hell, if they were real, there would probably be an army of twelve to fifteen-year-old girl vampires taking over the world. Every girl in that age range that he'd come across had an irrational obsession with vampires and was dying to find their "Edward"--whoever that was.
It made no sense that if such a creature existed, they wouldn't take advantage of those little girls just like the politicians were taking advantage of natural disaster victims. It was human nature--well, just nature. It was survival of the fittest and the smartest. Animals prey on the weak and the willing. When a teenage girl wants to fall in love with you and live with you forever, it seems like it would be a fair trade for a good, easy meal. If vampires did actually exist, they must not keep up with pop culture at all.
In these memory dreams, however, the only teenage girls he came in contact with wanted to risk everything to kill him, not fall in love with him. These girls called themselves "slayers" and made a hobby out of hunting down and killing vampires. Maybe these slayers had gotten lucky and killed every last vampire in existence. That could be why there aren't any teenage girl vampires running around. It would be a long shot--since as far as he could tell there was only one slayer at a time--but it might explain things.
During his time as a vampire in these dreams, he had already killed two slayers and was working on a third. This girl's name was Buffy Summers and she was a perky, blonde, cheerleader-type with real determination. She seemed to have fun with her calling, unlike most of the other slayers he'd remembered. In the dream he had just awoken from, she didn't even want to use a weapon when fighting him, which made no sense at all. It was like she just wanted to fight and not to kill. He didn't understand it, but it excited him when his vampire self was about to bag a third slayer, due to her stupidity in fighting unarmed. Unfortunately, he awoke when the girl's mother clocked him with an axe, so he assumed that he didn't get the kill.
What really didn't make sense about this dream was how he awoke smiling as a result of remembering the girl's face. There was something different about her that he couldn't quite put a finger on from the dream alone. All he knew was that thinking about the girl made it feel like his heartbeat doubled and he couldn't get the image of her out of his mind.
As far as he knew, he was in love with another vampire and she was very, very ill. In a recent dream, Drusilla and he had been in Prague on a killing spree until he was nearly killed by an angry mob and she was kidnapped and tortured by one of the church inquisitors. Spike rescued her, but the methods the inquisitor had used in torturing her left her in a physical state as weak as her mental one.
Another thing John didn't understand was why in these dreams he loved this girl as much as he did. She was completely mad and extremely unfaithful. She was beautiful and could see into the future, but that didn't seem to be enough to love her as unconditionally as he did. If he could redo everything in these dreams, he would have left her the minute he saw her sleeping with her sire, Angelus.
He wouldn't have continued to live like that; he could be using the superhuman strength to help people. Sure, in the dreams he needed to drink blood to survive, but all of that violence was unnecessary. There had to be a way of buying blood from hospitals or butcher shops.
Buying blood? What, am I starting to go insane?
John abruptly shook his head and finished off his cup of coffee.
Okay, so even before he started having these dreams about vampires, his life wasn't exactly normal. He had travelled the world, the universe, the space-time continuum.
But that all made sense. There was science behind time travel and outer space--even aliens. He couldn't really explain it, but the people he used to work for could. Quantum mechanics this, relativity that. It was all physics. Drinking blood and living as a reanimated corpse wasn't. It was what you'd read about in myths and legends, not in a university textbook.
Plus, if he was a vampire, why didn't he need blood now? Why could he survive on human food? Where were his fangs?
None of it was rational, but he continued to search for clues that this person in his dreams was real. He'd been all over the world already searching for Drusilla or Angelus or even Angelus's sire, Darla. The only luck he had was finding the house he would have lived in as a human and the grave of William Pratt. He even dug up the grave to see if there was a body there that happened to look like him. Maybe this guy in his dreams was some sort of doppelganger.
Just as he had dreaded, the coffin was empty. It still didn't mean anything he dreamt was real. People dig up graves all the time in major cities like London, right?
The next stop in his search for remnants of his "past" was a city called Sunnydale in California. He couldn't find out much about it online, but he knew exactly how to get there. It seemed that the last time anything about the place was updated was in 2003, eight years ago. There were no listings for "Buffy Summers" or any of the other names he could remember. It was like the place disappeared off the face of the earth.
Since the internet was no help, he decided to check it out for himself. Maybe if the town didn't exist, he could just discount all of these bizarre dreams as false and get on with his life. It would take about a couple hours to get there from the random Californian town he'd stopped in the previous night.
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Well, he was right when he thought the town disappeared off of the face of the earth.
John nearly crashed his bike into a tall wire fence before he fully understood what was in front of him. Where there was once a city, there was now an enormous crater. A few feet from the edge of the road, next to the fence, was a large stone wall with an engraving of a sun and words large enough for him to read across the top. It read "Sunnydale Memorial."
He decided to check it out to see if maybe there was mention of Buffy or her friends or something. Not that he was worried that she could have died in whatever caused the massive hole in the earth. He just wanted to see if there was any reason to keep believing the fantasy memories, since the town obviously existed at some point.
There were over a dozen entries, some names familiar, some not. One immediately caught his eye.
Joyce Summers
1958-2001
Beloved Mother
Survived By Her Daughters Buffy and Dawn
So the girl was real. And the woman who had saved her from him died in 2001.
He continued to skim over the names: Jenny Calendar, Tara Maclay, Warren Mears, Jonathan Levinson, Cassie Newton, Anya Jenkins, etc. The latest death year was 2003, so the town couldn't have lasted much longer than that.
What was at the very bottom of the wall was something he would never have expected and made him almost collapse in shock.
This memorial is dedicated to
William "Spike" Pratt
Unknown - 2003
The Slayer Of Slayers
Truly Love's Bitch
A Monster Who Became A Man
My Champion
He Was Forgiven And Loved
We Can Rest Now
Why would he have an entry on a wall of the dead? And an even better question was why in heaven's name would the entire wall be dedicated to him. As far as he knew, this person--vampire--in his dreams was only a monster and would never be considered a champion. No one would have forgiven him for the acts of violence he'd committed and of the only two people who had ever loved him, one was dead and the other was too crazy to have ever written something this beautiful. Sure, he was obviously a slayer of slayers and had even called himself love's bitch a time or two, but the rest of it was complete madness.
Suddenly, he couldn't wait to fall asleep and dream more about Spike's adventures. Spike was a monster in these dreams and now John was a man, so maybe this was about him after all and these dreams were real.
Maybe I'll visit a barber when I get to LA and try out the bleached look. I wonder where I can find a leather duster...
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A/N: Please, please, please review! I'm really excited about writing this and it is my first Buffyverse fic, so any criticism would be awesome! Thanks!
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>> Chapter 2